I’m writing this short essay as an exploration into power structures. As an opinion piece, I’m sure that many could have significant issues with the assumptions herein. If so, I welcome feedback since I’m still exploring ideas.

I’d like to start out with a thought about semantics and fallacies.

It’s easy to get distracted by details. The further you can get from something, the easier it is to see it in relation to everything around it. Environment and context is so important to fully understanding the importance and effect of a subject, that it’s worth stripping away as much superfluous information as possible.

An internet career wasn’t intentional. At fifteen, I accidentally got my first gig building a janky HTML website for $1300, back when being a webmaster was still a viable career.

Thirteen years later, the internet is still here. And through some periods of starvation alternating with windfalls, forty countries, a few worn-out pairs of Vans, good jobs, bad jobs, I’m somehow still here too.

I met Anya last year, and because it’s always wise to make multiple life decisions at once, we decided to quit our jobs, start a company, and get married all in the same year.

We started Discosloth because we were tired of hearing jargon while seeing no results. It’s so easy for those in the digital world to throw around a lot of buzzwords & processes and never actually do what marketing is supposed to do: make people more money.

We don’t like funnel-hacking gamification through disruptive tech.

We don’t like agile inbound marketing thought leadership.

We don’t like pivoting to customer journey growth hacks.

Corporate inefficiency, along with all the spreadsheets and processes and bullshit tedium, is exactly what we’re not. So we’ve based our entire workflow around providing clients with what they want: more money.

Marketing consulting is not a glamorous niche. We provide paid advertising management and the transparent reporting we think clients deserve. It’s actually pretty boring. But, since Anya is smarter than I am, we’ve already seen what I consider totally unexpected success in our launch.

We’re currently onboarding new clients. If your company needs help squeezing the maximum ROI out of your online advertising campaigns, give us a holler.

A couple days ago I got back from Eastern Europe: Romania, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary.

Part of traveling, or even more so living abroad, is a direct experience with globalization. You’re heading out from your origins & creating an effect in another place; you’re letting that place effect you. Ideally you’re creating value & producing something of substance while you’re at it, enriching both yourself and those around you.

Eastern Europe has seen an explosion of globalization within the past few years, and I suspect it’ll only increase in the next few.

There seems to be two bipolar camps around the question of globalization.

In late September, I got back from a 40-day trip around the world. I saw quite the range: from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara, from the world’s northernmost capital to the world’s southernmost capital, from glaciers to jungles, from icebergs to beaches.

The concept of easy travel is a brand new thing.

You might enjoy this video, the first of a series of travel videos produced during the trip.

Diogenes, the famous Greek philosopher, was once asked where he was from. He replied “I am a citizen of the world”. The Greek word for this is kosmopolitês.

Later on, the Stoic crowd further developed Diogenes’ thought into an entire framework called cosmopolitanism. Essentially, the circle model of identity puts yourself in the middle of expanding concentric circles of importance: immediate family, extended family, friends, neighbors, humanity. This was underscored by an emphasis of the importance of a shared affinity for humanity.

I like cosmopolitanism. It seems like a healthy way to view the world.

For the past few months I’ve been working on a book oriented towards people in nonprofit marketing. There’s a huge potential for those in the nonprofit industry to learn more about the nuts and bolts of marketing: common business principles aren’t often put to enough use in the world of nonprofits, and it would be a smart move for a lot of entities to consider integrating more sustainable practices in their operations. Continue reading Organizational Marketing: Telling Stories With Faces→

The largest slum in South Africa, Khayelitsha, is a township just outside Cape Town. It’s composed of around 400,000 residents, most of which are Xhosa.

It’s so much different from the expected mental image of an African slum, as it’s both on the beach and cold and windy. Residents walk around in parkas rather than t-shirts, at least in the winter, and the ground is white sand rather than clay or mud. Continue reading Khayelitsha, South Africa→